Abstract
This article explores the post 2000 national identity formation through the use of national
heroes narrative and the Heroes’ Acre shrine in Zimbabwe. The Heroes’ Acre marks the
country’s physical reminder of the past and acts as a tool for national identity and its symbolic
maintenance through state presided rituals that happen at the shrine. Attached to the Heroes’
Acre as a permanent physical symbol of nationhood are the people the burial site was built for
–the heroes, that is, the ‘war’ dead and the living who participated in the country’s liberation
‘war’. The argument made in this paper is that the definition and usages of heroes and Heroes’
Acre has mutated over the years to suit ZANU-PF’s shifting political agendas. Specifically the
article addresses questions around conferment of a hero’s status on the dead, access to the
Heroes’ Acre and the meanings of these to the emotive issue of nurturing a monolithic
Zimbabwean national identity as imagined by ZANU-PF. The article concludes that the elite’s
uses of the Heroes’ Acre and heroes’ status which excludes democratic public participation has
served to carve a skewed and narrow narrative on the meaning of Zimbabweanness meant to
bolster ZANU-PF’s hegemony. National identities, the article argues, are transient and always
changing.